Evolutionary analysis 5th edition herron test bank 1

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Chapter 7 Mendelian Genetics in Populations II: Migration, Drift, & Nonrandom Mating 1) The assumptions of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium principle include all of the following except ________.

A) random mating B) no migration C) limited population size D) All of these are assumptions of Hardy-Weinberg.

Answer: C Section: 7.1/7.2 Skill: Knowledge/Comprehension 2) Gene flow through migration ________.

A) has no effect on allele frequencies of populations B) can go only in one direction C) may have the largest impact on small populations, such as those on islands D) maintains the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium Answer: C Section: 7.1 Skill: Application/Analysis 3) Suppose a founding population carries an allelic frequency not typical of the original population. Which of the following effects would most likely lead to homogenization?

A) genetic drift within the founding population B) random mating within the founding population C) no mutations within either population D) migration between the original and founding populations E) None of the above.

Answer: D Section: 7.1 Skill: Application/Analysis

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4) Data in the accompanying figure shows the results of allelic frequency analysis of an insectpollinated plant whose seeds are transported by wind and water, therefore making this plant one of the first colonizers of new islands. The data―particularly the lower variation of allele frequencies of intermediate-aged populations―supports the hypothesis that ________.

A) genetic drift tends to homogenize populations B) migration tends to homogenize populations C) gene flow tends to homogenize populations D) A, B, and C are all accurate.

E) B and C are both accurate.

Answer: E Section: 7.1 Skill: Application/Analysis

2 Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

5) Figure 7.6 from your text, shown below, is a set of histograms showing the frequency of different color patterns of water snakes of Lake Erie (Nerodia sipedon). Type A snakes are unbanded, Type B are strongly banded, and Types C and D are intermediates. Given that natural selection favors unbanded snakes on the islands, how can you account for the presence/perpetuation of banded snakes on the islands?

A) Mutation rates converting unbanded alleles to a banded form operate at high frequencies on islands.

B) Natural selection favors unbanded snakes on the mainland.

C) Snakes on the islands represent a case of the so-called founder effect.

D) Natural selection favors banded snakes on the mainland, which occasionally migrate to the islands.

Answer: D Section: 7.1 Skill: Application/Analysis 6) In terms of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, genetic drift results from a violation of ________.

A) the random mating assumption B) the lack of natural selection assumption C) the infinite population size assumption D) the lack of mutation assumption E) the lack of migration assumption Answer: C Section: 7.2 Skill: Knowledge/Comprehension

3 Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

7) Although most of the mechanisms of evolution are nonrandom, the one that is absolutely random is ________.

A) sexual selection B) natural selection C) artificial selection D) genetic drift Answer: D Section: 7.2 Skill: Knowledge/Comprehension 8) There are occasions when theoretical expectations do not match with actual outcomes, as you see in the case of zygote formation leading to genetic drift. This discrepancy is known as ________.

A) sampling bias B) sampling error C) nonrandom mating D) random mutations Answer: B Section: 7.2 Skill: Knowledge/Comprehension 9) The accompanying figure details the possible outcomes in a scenario in which 10 zygotes are formed from a gene pool where frequency of the allele A1 is 0.6, and A2 is 0.4. This graph is shown here. According to this graph, the probability that the frequency of A1 will remain the same in the next generation is about ________.

A) 8% B) 12% C) 16% D) 18% E) none of the above Answer: D Section: 7.2 Skill: Application/Analysis 4 Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

10) The accompanying figure details the possible outcomes in a scenario in which 10 zygotes are formed from a gene pool where the frequency of the allele A1 is 0.6, and A2 is 0.4. This graph is shown here. According to this graph, the probability that the frequency of A1 will increase to 0.7 in the next generation is about ________.

A) 8%.

B) 12% C) 16% D) 40% E) 70% Answer: B Section: 7.2 Skill: Application/Analysis 11) Unusually high rates of rare heritable traits, such as achromatopsia in the Pingelapese people, is often due to ________.

A) genetic drift B) natural selection C) hitchhiking D) the founder effect E) None of the above.

Answer: D Section: 7.2 Skill: Knowledge/Comprehension

5 Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

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pay, he answered that he possessed not one farthing; he was then informed that they were going to set fire to his cabin, in order to oblige him to evacuate the premises. The act soon followed the threat. A lighted match applied to the thatched roof, and in a few minutes the whole was in conflagration. All the neighbouring populations, who had run on to the scene of the tragedy, saluted the dreadful deed with hooting and execration.

The myrmidons of the law pursued nevertheless the execution of their mandate. They went next to the dwelling of another tenant, Thomas Burke, inscribed on the list of debtors for a sum of £20. He had five children, and, like the above-mentioned, not one farthing to offer to the creditors. Order was given to set fire to his roof, but it was found to be so damp that fire would not take; so they had to attack the walls with the crowbar and pick-axe. The miserable inmates appeared then to the eyes of the indignant crowd, half naked, wan, emaciated, and starved; and so heartrending was the scene that with difficulty the representative of the League (who had come there for that very purpose) prevented the mob from stoning the bailiffs to death.

Then came the turn of the third cottage. Two old men lived in it, Patrick and Thomas Diggin. The family of the former included ten persons; that of the latter, six. They owed a rent of £8, and had not a shilling between them all. Patrick’s wife, however, came forward, and declared she had just received £2 from her daughter, who was a servant in Belfast. Would they accept that, and stop the execution? The undersheriff, whom the duties of his office oblige to back the bailiffs, urged them to accept the touching offer. They refused, and set fire to the roof.

Then Patrick Diggin, an eighty-year-old man, was seen coming out of his home sobbing; he was followed by all his children and grandchildren. By an irresistible impulse of sympathy all crowd round him, offering what little they possess to the relief of that misery. The constables themselves, moved almost to tears, contribute their silver coin to the subscription which has been spontaneously organized. To carry the barbarous work further becomes an impossibility. The sheriff’s substitute gives the signal for departure, and the cavalcade follows amidst the derisive cries of the multitude.

All those poor people, except one family, have since been re-installed on their holdings, and are now at work on their farms—a strange evidence of the uselessness and cruelty of eviction, to make tenants pay who cannot.

V

I

.

At Cahirciveen, I crossed the strait which divides the main land from the island of Valentia. This is the extreme point of the old continent, where the Transatlantic cables are placed. Good, honest, plucky fellows! what repose after the misery of Kerry! I am speaking of the fishermen of the island, a peculiar race who never ploughed any fields but those of the ocean. Every night they risk their lives on the giant billows, and earn their bread valiantly. They know nothing of sheep rot, potato disease, or landlordism; all they know is the management of their boats, the making and mending of their nets, and the art of making the deep yield food for their young. Strangers to the neighbouring world, they ignore even its language, and only talk the rude idiom of their ancestors, the Irish of the time of the O’Donoghue.

Noble fellows! I shall not soon forget the night I spent there watching them as they were fishing between the Skellings, two enormous rocks that rise like Gothic cathedrals, about twelve miles from Bray Head, and on which the waves are eternally breaking with a thundering noise. My guide had warned me against offering them money; it would offend them, he said, so I did not do it. I simply drank with them a glass of whisky when they prepared to go home towards daybreak, the stars still shining. And, comparing their happy courage with the distress of Kerry, I wished them from the bottom of my heart never to become acquainted with agriculture on small holdings, under an English landlord.

CHAPTER X. RURAL PHYSIOLOGY. We have glanced at a few facts presenting symptoms of the Irish disease, which were taken as chance guided us, in a ride through a southwestern county. Similar symptoms are everywhere to be found through the island. To appreciate them at their right value, as even to comprehend them, it is essentially requisite to know, at least in its broader outlines, the physiology of landed property in this entirely agricultural country.

Vast landed property and parcelled-out culture. This is the epitome of such a physiology. At the base of the social edifice we find the tenant, generally a Catholic and of indigenous race, occupying and cultivating after his own fashion the thousandth or ten thousandth part of a property ranging over an area of some hundred thousand acres. At the summit we find the landlord, almost invariably of English and Protestant race, ruling by right of primogeniture over this immense space.

Does this right rest at its origin on confiscation and spoliation, as is averred by the Irish? That is of little importance from a legal point of view, for prescription has covered the spoliation by an occupation of two to eight centuries. It is of far greater importance from a moral point of view, because that grievance, ill or well founded, serves as a handle for all agrarian recriminations.

In three out of five cases (so it has been shown by recent statistics) the landlord is an absentee, that is to say, he does not reside on his property, nor even in the kingdom, and spends abroad the money he raises on his lands. His income, from that source alone, is sometimes enormous— £10,000 a year—(Lord Greville, Westmeath; Lord Carisford, Wicklow; Mr. Wandesford, Kilkenny; Mr. King, Longford; Lord Inchiquin, Clare); £16,000 a year—(Lord Claremont, Louth; Mr. Naper, Meath; Lord Leconfield, Clare; Lord Ventry, Kerry); £26,000 and £32,000 a year— (Duke of Abercorn, Tyrone; Marquis of Clanricarde, Galway; Lord Kenmare, Kerry); £40,000, £80,000, and even £120,000 a year—(Mr. MacDonnell, Kildare; Marquis of Coningham, Cavan, Clare, and Donegal; Marquis of Londonderry, Down; Marquis of Downshire, &c.).

Rent rolls of £4,000, £3,000, and £2,000 a year too plentiful to be mentioned.

Three-fifths at least of those sums are lost every year for Ireland, and they go out of the island without having in any way helped to increase her capital in agricultural machinery, live stock, and general improvements of the land. As a natural consequence, the soil is illcultivated, ill-manured, insufficiently covered with cattle. For centuries its energies have suffered a constant draining, and nothing has been done to repair its losses.

That soil has a tendency to subdivision in the hands of the tenants, who cultivate it by truly pre-historic methods. The figures are given in round numbers as follows:— Against 24,000 holdings of a value of above £500 a year there are in Ireland 85,000 holdings producing from £25 to £500 a year; 49,000 from £12 to £29 a year; 77,000 from £8 to £12 a year; 196,000 from £4 to £8 a year; lastly, 218,000 holdings of a revenue of under £4 a year.

That is to say, out of six or seven hundred thousand families, living exclusively upon the product of the soil, more than two-thirds must get their sustenance from a wretched bit of ground, estimated by the owner himself at a value of £4 to £8 a year!

To state such an economical paradox is to denounce it. Where there is nothing, the landlord, like the king, loses his rights. The situation, then, would already be strangely anomalous, even if the respective titles of landlord and tenant were of the clearest and most transparent kind. But it is complicated in Ireland by the most curious conceptions and customs in matters of landed property.

To understand those conceptions and customs, a Frenchman must begin by putting aside all his Latin ideas. With us, since the Convention, one can always know by the Survey-Rolls to whom belongs absolutely such or such a piece of land. He who owns it is free to sell it, to give it, to let it as he pleases. His right is absolute; it is the right of “use and abuse,” according to the forcible expression of the Roman code. It passes with this absolute character to sons, grandsons, or legatees.

In Ireland it is feudal law that obtains still; an estate is not a property, it is a fief. The lord of that estate is not the proprietor of it, he is an usufructuary, as it were, a life-tenant on it. He has only a limited right to his own land. He cannot sell it without the written consent of his substitute in the entail, and the authorization of the persons, often countless in numbers, that have some hereditary right on his property at the same time with him; most of the estates are encumbered with perpetual rents, served out either to the younger branches of the family, to old servants, or to creditors. All the titulary is free to alienate is his life interest, through some insurance combination with transfer of income.

If we add that the said titulary is generally absent from his property, that he does not manage it personally, and that in many cases he does not even exactly know where it is to be found, we must own that it is no wonder he is considered as a stranger.

A stranger he is besides, in race, by habits, by religion, by language.

And yet this stranger,—precisely because his fief, practically inalienable, as it is immovable in its limits, has always been transmitted from father to eldest son in the family,—this stranger, of whom often nothing is known beyond his name, has a story, true or legendary, attached to him and to his title. It matters little that the revenue of the estate was scattered over five hundred heads, in the course of ten generations; the estate remains, and weighs on him with all its weight. We do not speak here of a mere geographical expression, of an area a hundred times parcelled out, altered, disfigured, in less than a century, but of land that for a thousand years, maybe, has changed neither form nor aspect.

At night, by the fireside, old people will recall how in former days this land was the collective property of the clan; how they were defrauded by a political chief that treacherously gave it up to the English, in order to receive investiture from their hands; how, following the fortunes of twenty successive rebellions and repressions, it was confiscated, sequestered, given anew, till it came to the actual landlords. A special literature, ballads, popular imagery, little books, and penny papers constantly harp on that ancient spoliation. It is the only history studied under thatched roofs. The peasant breathes it in the atmosphere, imbibes it by all his pores.

Convinced that he has a hereditary right to the domain in general, the Irish peasant besides attributes to himself a special and prescriptive right to the plot of ground that he, like the landlord, occupies from father to son, though on a precarious tenure. This right is not purely imaginary; it was consecrated in the year 1860 by a special Act of Parliament, due to the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. Recognised from immemorial times in Ulster, it has always been claimed in all the other parts of Ireland; it is the tenant right, what in our own Picardy is called the droit de marché.

It is well known in what consist this ancient prerogative of the Picardy farmer (Troplong in the Preface to his Traité du Louage, and Lefort in his Histoire des contrats de location perpétuelle, have treated it exhaustively): it is simply the privilege of preserving in perpetuity for him and for his heirs, the use of the ground for which he pays rent regularly.

Not only is this privilege not denied to him, but he can transfer it to a third person, for a premium that goes by the name of intrade. The amount of that premium is often a third or even a half of the intrinsic value of the soil. Formerly this “droit de marché” applied to everything that can be let or hired; the labourers, the threshers, the shepherds of a domain, each claimed it in his own province as a hereditary monopoly. In modern days it is strictly limited to the hiring of servants, in the few districts where it survived the French revolution (in Péronne for instance).

The thing that is only a curious exception in France has remained the rule in Ireland, where tenant right has been in force for the last twentyseven years. And what, after all, can be better founded than such a right?

Has not the tenant, in the majority of cases, made his plot of ground what it is? Has he not tilled it, improved it, manured it, drained it according to his better knowledge; in a word, has he not created it in its actual form?

“Let us,” says the peasant, “admit the rights of the landlord. How could he deny me mine? Are they not legibly written in the furrow I have traced upon this earth, in the fruits I have made her bear?... The land is not a simple material, unreducible like a piece of gold. It is a chemical product, a conglomerate that is valuable especially by reason of all the substances I have mixed up with it during an occupation of ten, twenty, thirty years, or even more.... Who shall dare to deny the share I have brought into this company of which I am the acting manager, and deny that this share belongs to me?”

Such a theory would doubtless appear sheer lunacy to the French proprietor who has paid for his land £400 per hectare, and who has let it for a fixed period at a fixed price, with the understanding that at the end of the contract he shall find it in good condition and shall then do what he pleases with it. That theory, however, is so well suited to Ireland, where custom has the force of law, that the landlord does not even think, practically, of disputing the tenant’s right.

As a rule he is only too glad to let his land to the farmers who have traditionally occupied it, on condition that they pay the usual rent.

But in practice, the Land Act of 1860, apparently so much in favour of the tenant, has produced disastrous effects. In the first place, by consecrating the right of the tenant only on improvements and enlargements made with the landlord’s consent. Thence the consequence that not only is the landlord never willing to spend a farthing on the improvements of the land, but also that he systematically opposes them, for fear he should have to pay for them in the end. Besides many landlords have signed their new leases only after the farmer has given them a formal renunciation to the tenant right; or else they have taken advantage of the pretext that offered itself, and raised the rent by way of compensation against all risks. Lastly, in many a place where this right has become positive, the rural usurers alone have profited by it by discounting it to the peasantry.

The consequence is that the tenant right is often reduced practically to the implicit acknowledgment of the right of the farmer to occupy the land, so long as he pays his rent. It even happens not unfrequently that there is no lease and the occupancy goes on indefinitely without title.

Doubtless this gives it only more value in the eyes of the peasant, naturally inclined to associate this absence of scrivening with the acknowledgment of his traditional rights.

Having been able in certain cases to sell or hire his “interest,” he feels the more inclined to think himself entitled to divide it between his children. That division has become the rule, and what was once a farm of thirty to fifty acres turns out, at the third generation, parcelled in ten or twelve scraps of three to five acres. The landlord might have interfered in the beginning; he might have prevented such a division; he did not do it. Beside, that division of the land is recorded nowhere, has been the occasion of no formal deed; one member of the family answers for all the others, if necessary. How is one to unravel those private

arrangements? And, after all, what does it matter, so long as the rents come in?

They come in during ten, during twenty years. Then the harvest is bad, or the sub-dividing of the soil has arrived at the last limit compatible with the needs of those that cultivate it. The rent is no longer paid, and then the difficulties begin. How is one to appraise the improvements introduced in the land by the actual possessor, or by his forefathers? How can one find out what is due to him, even with the best intentions? Is the landlord to give him an indemnity before he evicts him? But then it means ruin to the landlord, who will have to pay precisely because he has not been paid himself. It is the squaring of the circle. When only very small holdings are in question, the difficulty is generally met by remaining in statu quo. But supposing the debt to be more important, or to have been transferred to a third person, which is often the case, the question becomes insoluble.

Let us repeat that we must not consider these things from a French point of view. With us the idea of individual property is always of the clearest and simplest. The frequent sales and buying of land contribute still to make this idea of more actual and definite meaning to us. An hectare of grass or vine is, like any other goods, a merchandise that passes from hand to hand, and remains with the highest bidder. In Ireland the sales are rare, and in no case is it a question of absolute ownership; it is only a question about the respective and contradictory rights, some for life, some perpetual, some positive, others customary, of several persons over the same space of land, a space not to be transferred, not to be seized, and not to be fractionised. Is it any wonder that such contradictory pretensions should give rise to constant conflicts?

Everything concurs to shut in that rural world in a vicious circle. Not only does the peasant lack capital to improve his farming, but, assured of seeing his rent raised if he ventured on the least improvement, he is careful to make none. On his side the landlord, for dread of annoying contestations, opposes as much as lies in his power any amendment susceptible of being turned into a title for his tenant.

Is there a succession of relatively good harvests? He immediately raises the rent. Are the following years bad? He refuses to return to the

old rate, in principle at least, because he finds it inconvenient to curtail a revenue to which he has accustomed himself, because he does not like to appear to bow before the League, and also because, being liable to expropriation, he is unwilling to depreciate beforehand the value of his property, which is always valued according to its rent.

Lastly, the holdings, being too often mere plots of ground, are hardly sufficient to keep the peasant and his family occupied, and do not always give him a sufficiency of food. And just because it is so, the unlucky wretch does not find work outside sufficient for the equilibrium of his poor finances. The class of agricultural labourers can hardly be said to exist in numerous districts, because everyone is a small farmer. The tenant then becomes completely sunk in his inaction; he becomes apathetic, and from a sluggard too often turns into a drunkard. His wife is ignorant and careless. She can neither sew, nor is she able to give a palatable taste to his monotonous fare. His children are pallid and dirty.

Everything is sad, everything is unlovely around him; and, like a dagger festering in the wound, the thought that all his misery is due to the English usurper ever makes his heart bleed.

To all these causes of poverty and despair must be added the general difficulties that weigh on agriculture in all countries of Europe, the lowered prices of transport, the clearings of land in America and Australia, the awful transatlantic competition, the disease of potatoes....

The picture being finished, one thing only surprises—it is to find one single Irish farmer left in the country.

These explanations, with many others, were given me by a person that it is time I should introduce to the reader; for he is the incarnation of one of the essential wheels in the machinery of Irish landed property— Captain Pembroke Stockton, land agent.

The captain is a small fair man, of slim figure, of military aspect, who received me this morning at an office where he employs half a dozen clerks. The room was lined with green-backed ledgers, or, to speak more exactly, with rows of tin boxes, of a chocolate colour. To-night he receives me in a pleasant villa, where he takes me in his phaeton, drawn by two magnificent horses. He may be about fifty-three years old. His calm, regular-featured countenance owes its peculiar character to the line that cuts his forehead transversely, and divides it into two parts, one white, the other bronzed by the sun; a mark left by the English foragecap, which is like a small muffin, and is worn on one side of the head.

The captain has seen service in India; he fought against Nana-Sahib, and even hung with his own hand a certain number of rebels, as he not unfrequently relates after dinner. He sold out when about thirty-five years of age, at a period when selling out still existed (in 1869), and got for his commission £3200, which, besides a small personal competency, allowed him to marry a charming girl, dowerless, according to the excellent English habit; children came: means became too straitened, and, to enlarge them, he resolved to become a land agent.

The land agent has no equivalent in France, except for house property.

He is neither a notary, nor a steward, and yet he partakes of both, being the intermediary between landlord and tenant. It is he that draws up the leases and settlements; he who receives the rents, who sends out summons, who signs every six months the cheque impatiently expected by the landlord; he who represents him at law, he who negotiates his loans, mortgages, cessions of income, and all other banking operations.

In a word, he is the landlord’s prime minister, the person who takes on his shoulders all the management of his affairs, and reduces his profession to the agreeable function of spending money. The land agent naturally resides as a rule in the vicinity of the estate. Therefore he knows everybody by name; knows all about the incumbrances, the resources of every tenant, the length and breadth of every field, the price of produce, the probable value of the harvest; all the threads are in his hands; the landlord counts upon him, approves everything he does, upholds his rigours, and submits to his tolerance. Is he not himself at his mercy? The agent keeps all his deeds of property; has personally written out every one of them; knows, in fact, a great deal more than himself about it.

Let us premise that very considerable interests are in question, and that the rents are ciphered by thousands of pounds sterling. It is easy to understand that the agent must be not only a man of honour, a clever man, a business man, but above all a man presenting the most serious guarantees from a financial point of view.

That is sufficient to imply that they are not counted by dozens in every district; and that a land agent provided with all the necessary qualifications must before long govern all the principal estates in a

county. From his office, situated in the principal county-town, he rules over ten, twenty, or thirty, square miles of land, cultivated by five or six thousand farmers, under some twenty landlords.

Thence the natural consequence that the same policy generally prevails in all the administration of the landed property in one district.

The personal character of the landlord may, indeed, influence it in some ways, but the character of the agent is of far greater importance. And thence this other consequence, not less serious for the farmer, and which gives the key to many an act of agrarian violence,—that in case of open war, in case of eviction especially, it is not only an affair between the landlord and the tenant, but also between the tenant and all the landlords in his county, through their one representative.

Has he been evicted? It will be well-nigh impossible for him to get another farm in this county, where he was born, where his relations are living, where he has all his habits, all his roots, as it were. And no work to be had outside agricultural work.... Emigration only is open to him,— which is equivalent to saying that eviction must necessarily be followed by transportation.

Let us imagine all the owners of houses in Paris, bound together in association, to be in the hands of a single agent; let us suppose that a dweller in one of those houses is turned out of it for quarrelling with his concierge or for any other reason, and unable to find a house to live in; we shall then have an idea of the state of mind in which eviction places the Irish peasant. Let us add that this peasant has generally built with his own hand the hut that is taken from him; let us add that for him it is not only a question of knowing whether he shall have a roof over his head, but a question of being able to live by the only trade he has learnt.

For many other reasons, the question of agencies on a large scale still contributes to make the problem more intricate.

In all affairs personal intercourse brings an element the importance of which must not be overlooked. A man will display the greatest inflexibility in writing, who will hesitate to do so face to face with his opponent. If the landlord knew his tenants, if he lived among them, if he entered into their life and saw their misery, very often, may be, he would recoil before barbarous rigours, while the agent, by his very profession is obliged to act with the precision of a guillotine. The influence of women, so gentle and conciliatory, is absent from the system. Pity, sympathy,

human contact, have no part in it. Can we wonder if harmony be destroyed?

Examples are not wanting to show that a different system, a policy of gentleness, of direct and mutual concessions, and well directed efforts, bear very different results. I shall quote as an instance the case of an English lady, Miss Sherman Crawford, who bought, some twenty years ago, at a legal sale, a small half-ruined estate in Ireland. She went to live on it, and began by giving her ten or twelve tenants a written promise that they would get the benefit of all their improvements without having cause to fear that the rent should be raised. Then she made it a rule that everyone should come directly to her in case of difficulties, and not to an agent.

She built a few sheds, repaired two or three cottages, on occasions lent a five pound note to facilitate the buying of a cow or pig. That was enough. In spite of the difference in race, religion, and language, she and her peasantry are on perfect terms with each other; her property of Timoleague thrives in the midst of general poverty and wretchedness; not an inch of ground lies uncultivated; the soil is well manured, well drained, well used; the people are happy and contented. To perform that miracle, all that was wanted was a little willingness, a little good management and gentleness.

But then Miss Crawford’s property is neither too large nor too small.

She brings there the capital needed, and allows it to circulate in the place. She sees everything with her own eyes, not with the eyes of an agent. She is not the titulary of an entailed estate, and has not given up its income to usurers. Her farms are large enough to allow her tenants to find their sustenance on them, for themselves and their families. In a word, her property is in everything the reverse of what is seen in all other parts of the island.

And in truth, if delirious legislators had proposed to themselves the task of inventing a system of landed property that would give neither security to the owner nor peace to the tenant, where could they have succeeded better than with the Irish system? It is at once stupid and ferocious, absurd and monstrous. How true, alas! that human genius, so well able sometimes to profit by natural forces, excels also in sterilizing them, in making them homicides!

CHAPTER XI. EMIGRATION. Before setting foot in this country your notions are not unfrequently ready made about the characters of the inhabitants. You have gathered them from miscellaneous reading, novel-reading mostly, and what you expect is an Ireland poor certainly, but nevertheless gay, improvident, chivalrous, addicted to sound drinking, good eating, fond of practical jokes, not unmixed with riot and even blows; an Ireland, in short, such as Charles Lever and Carleton, Banim and Maxwell, Sam Lover and Thackeray have described; an Ireland where wit and humour are to be met at every step, where the last beggar has his little joke, where originality of thought, unexpectedness of action, fun inexhaustible, combine to form that eccentricity of manner which is ever associated with the idea of an Irishman.

That such an Ireland was, not long ago, a reality, one cannot doubt. A whole literature, a rich collection of tales, novels and legends is there to witness to the fact. Its historical existence is as scientifically demonstrated as that of our “Régence.” The worldly exploits of the Duke of Richelieu are not better proved. But it is in vain you look to-day for that gay and careless Ireland; from Cape Clear to Malin Head, from Dublin to Galway, there is no vestige of it. She is dead and gone. Like Mr. Credit, bad payers have killed her. Between her and us there has been a great financial cataclysm where she has been wrecked: the crash of the great famine of 1846-1847.

Never did she rise from it. Forty years ago she contrived to exist somehow. The tenants were poor, to be sure, but the landlords were not, and they spent their money grandly. They led the usual life of rich country gentlemen, had large retinues of servants and horses, kept playing, drinking, and betting till they had only debts left, which course had at least the advantage of permitting their cash to circulate about the country. The local traffic was relatively large then. Butchers, coachmakers, wine-merchants, and horse-dealers made rapid fortunes. Few towns in Europe showed so much animation as Dublin, now so empty and so dull a place. Everybody was in debt with everybody; not one property was not mortgaged. It was the fashion at that time to pay only at

the last extremity. A general complicity gave force of law to that habit.

Lawsuits, of course, were plentiful, but what is there in a lawsuit to prevent a jolly squire from drinking hard, riding his horses at a breakneck pace, or galloping from morning till night behind his hounds?

Then came the potato-disease; then the famine, which brought in two years a general liquidation. Everyone awoke to find himself ruined; there were in six months fifty thousand evictions. The largest fortunes, when they escaped the Encumbered Estates Court, established in 1849, remained loaded with such heavy burdens that the income of the titulary fell to nothing. One was obliged to pinch then, to sell the horses, and shut up the kennel. There was an end to fun, and if there remained here and there some inveterate boon companion who would not give up the good old customs, the Moonlighters soon brought him to reason, poisoning his dogs and hunters, confiscating his arms, and at times mistaking the landlord for the game.

There is no vestige left now of the easy-going ways of old. The large town-houses and country seats are deserted or let to strangers; the cellar is empty, the dining-room silent. A gust of hatred and misery has blown on the isle and left all hearts frozen.

As for the peasant, the poor creature has too many cares for thinking of a joke now. Perhaps in other climes, under a clearer sky and warmer sun, he would revive, and find in his very distress the element for some witticism. But here, the damp atmosphere, united with persevering illfortune, has deluged and drowned for ever his Celtic good-humour.

Hardly does he find now and then a glimpse of it at the bottom of an alejug or in the tumult of some election riot. If a quick repartee, one of his characteristic sallies, escapes him now, it is always bitter, and reminds you of the acrid genius of Swift.

“How deliciously pure and fresh is the air in Dublin,” said Lady Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’s wife, to the author of “Gulliver.”

“For goodness’ sake, Madam, don’t breathe a word about it to the English. They would put a duty on it.”

And his terrible satire about the famous “excess of population,” that favourite hobby of economists, who has not it in mind?

“It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, where they see the streets, the roads, and cabindoors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms ... I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children ... is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and therefore, whosoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, easy members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation. I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts; which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassée or a ragout.

“I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof one-fourth part to be males ... that the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month so as to render them plump and fat for good tables. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and, seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

“I have reckoned, upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh twelve pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, will increase to twenty-eight pounds.

“I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would refuse to give two shillings for the carcase of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent

nutritive meat. Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcase: the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

“As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it; and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, then dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasted pigs....

“I think the advantages, by the proposals I have made, are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance: for first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation, as well as our most dangerous enemies.... Whereas the maintenance of a hundred thousand children, from two years old and upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation’s stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom, who have any refinement in taste. And all the money will circulate among ourselves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.... Besides, this would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards or enforced by laws and penalties.”

The grim sarcasm goes on in the same sinister, pitiless way up to the conclusion, which is worth the rest: “I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.”

Modern Philanthropy is not quite so bold as the Dean of St. Patrick in suggesting remedies for the relief of the sufferings of Ireland. Its great panacea is emigration. The first thing which attracts the eye in villages and boroughs is a large showy placard representing a ship in full sail, with the following words in large capitals, “Emigration! ... free passage to Canada, Australia, New Zealand! ... free passage and a premium to emigrants for Queensland!...”

Technical particulars follow; the agents’ addresses, the names of the outward-bound ships, &c.... These placards are everywhere. At each turning, on every wall they stare you in the face, and fascinate the starving man. Numerous and powerful emigration companies paid by colonies where hands are wanting, patronized by all that is influential in the kingdom, work unremittingly in recruiting that army of despair for a voluntary transportation. And thus a continuous stream of Irishmen is ebbing out through all the pores of the country.

Shall we give the official figures? There are none given unfortunately for the years between 1847 and 1851, corresponding to the “famine clearances” or famine evictions. All that is known is that at that time the population of Ireland suddenly decreased by one million six hundred and twenty-two thousand inhabitants, without it being possible to say how many had died of starvation, how many had embarked pell-mell on hundreds of ships, how many had perished at sea, how many had survived. Since 1851 the accounts are clear. It is known that 148,982 emigrants left Ireland in the eight last months of that year; 189,092 in 1852; 172,829 in 1853; 139,312 in 1854. During the following years the emigration slackens its pace by degrees and falls to the rate of 75,000 heads a year. It rises again in 1863-64, and attains the figure of over 105,000. Then it settles again to its level: 60,000, where for a time it remains stationary. Since 1880 it has risen again to 95,000, and over 100,000.

Within thirty years, the period included between the 1st of May, 1851, and the 1st of May, 1881, Ireland has lost through emigration alone two million five hundred and thirty-six thousand six hundred and twentyseven of her children. The total for the last five years has not yet been published, but it certainly reaches half a million. From the year 1851, therefore, at least three million Irish people of both sexes have left the island, that is to say, nearly the half of a population then reduced to sixand-a-half million souls.

Has, at least, the result of that frightful exodus been to eradicate pauperism? One would like to believe it. Theorists had promised it. But alas! stern statistics are there to answer their fallacies.

Statistics inform us that the Ireland of 1887, with its present population, inferior to that of London, is poorer than it was in 1841, when it numbered eight million inhabitants. Twenty years ago the number of individuals admitted to workhouses was 114,594 out of six million inhabitants. To-day it is 316,165 out of a population diminished by a third. In 1884 the poor who received relief at home were 442,289.

They are now 633,021. In other words, one Irishman out of four lives on public charity—when he lives at all.

Upon such facts, would you guess what monstrous conclusion the votaries of emigration at any price have come to? Simply this: that the blood-letting is not sufficient; that Ireland must be drained of another million inhabitants. Such is Lord Salisbury’s opinion. As if an area of 20,194,602 statute acres, so favoured geographically, was not calculated to nourish twelve or fifteen million human beings rather than three! (This was the opinion of Gustave de Beaumont, after Arthur Young.) As if the emigration of every healthy and industrious adult was not a nett loss for the country, just as is the guinea taken away by any absentee!

Is not his exit a sign of strength and energy in the emigrant? He was free to stay at home if he liked; to shut himself up in a workhouse and live there at the public expense. Has he not given by his very departure the best proof that he is not a useless member in the social body? What! you incite all that is able and active to go away, keeping only the weak, the old, the useless; to these you dole out what is necessary to keep up a flickering breath of life, and when poverty increases, you are surprised at it!

I bear in mind the reasons alleged by politicians. Elizabeth and Cromwell have invoked them before, when recurring to more drastic but equally vain measures. But, here again, the calculation is wrong; the eternal justice of things has not permitted it to succeed.

For all those whom the feudal system starves out of their native island take care, for the most part, not to go and fertilize with their work the British colonies. Vainly does the emigration agent offer them a free passage, grants of land, and even premiums in money. They prefer buying with their last penny a ticket which opens a free land to them.

They go to the United States, where they thrive almost to a miracle, and this is a decisive answer to the masters of their race, who are also its calumniators. They multiply there so as to form already a fifth part (twelve millions) of the total population of the great American Republic.

At the bar, in the press, in all liberal professions, they are a majority, and by their brilliant qualities, which often secure them the first rank, they exercise a real preponderance. But they never forget that they are Irish.

They keep the unimpaired remembrance of their beloved country, dear to their heart in proportion as she is unhappy. They remember their home burnt to the ground, the old grandfather thrown on the road-side, the little ones crying at the withered breast of a pallid mother, the wrench of parting, the heart-rending farewell; then the contumely during the voyage —the hardships after the landing; and they swear an oath that all shall be paid some day, and, in the meanwhile, they contribute their dollars to the healing of an ever-bleeding wound.

It is there that Fenianism was born. From their ranks come those conspirators who terrorize England with their periodic outrages. In all agrarian violence the hand of the emigrants is to be found. From 1848 to 1864 they have sent thirteen million pounds to those of their family that have remained in Ireland; and, from 1864 to 1887, perhaps double that sum. But in those figures, given by Lord Dufferin, the secret funds brought to the service of an ever-increasing agitation are not reckoned.

The Invincibles were in their pay. The Skirmishing Fund was entirely sustained by them. The National League lives, in a manner, upon their subsidies. When Mr. Parnell went to visit the United States, they were powerful enough to induce the Senate of Washington to give him the honours of the sitting—an exception which stands unique in history.

The independence of Ireland is their dream, their ambition, their hope, their luxury in life. The day when this is accomplished, England will perhaps realize that the Irish emigration has been a political blunder, as it is an economical mistake and a moral crime.

C

.

Wishing to see some of those who emigrate I have come to Cork. Cork is the great harbour of the South of Ireland, the gate that opens on America and Australia. From St. Patrick’s Bridge on the Lee a steamer took me to where three emigrant ships were at anchor ready to fly to other climes. I went on board two of them, one English, the other American. There was nothing particular to notice, except an under-deck disposed as a dormitory, as is the rule on board all maritime transports,

so as to lodge four or five hundred steerage passengers. These passengers bring with them their bedding, which consists generally of a coarse blanket, and the staple part of their eatables. A canteen affords them, at reasonable prices, all drinks or extras that they may think fit to add to their ordinary fare.

The impression I gather in these under-decks is rather a favourable one. There is as yet only the bare floor, but it is clean and well washed.

Through the hatches, wide open, a pure and bracing air circulates freely.

No doubt there will be some alteration after a few days’ voyage. But it is evident that the Queen’s administration keeps a sharp eye upon the emigration companies, and sees that all sanitary prescriptions are observed. One sees no longer now-a-days such scandalous spectacles as occurred in the years of the famine, when thousands of Irish were promiscuously heaped in the hold of coffin-ships, and died by hundreds before reaching the goal. Emigration is now one of the normal, it may be said one of the official, functions of social life in Ireland—a function which has its organs, laws, customs, and even its record-office. The companies keep their agents in all British possessions; they are informed of all the wants of those colonies; they know what specialists are in demand, what advantages are offered to the new-comer. They do their best to make the offer fit with the demand, and they seem to succeed.

An old boatswain on board one of the emigrant ships tells me that life there is generally monotonous but quiet. The passengers do not mix or associate as quickly as one could imagine. Each of them pitches his own separate camp on the few square feet that chance gives him, and it is only after eight or ten days’ voyage that they begin to club together. The mothers tend their babies, the fathers smoke their pipes, the children play, the young people flirt. It appears that a relatively considerable number of marriages are prepared and even concluded in the crossing.

There is nothing surprising in that, if we remember that the most numerous class of emigrants is composed of marriageable girls and men between twenty and twenty-five years of age.

A few types of emigrants taken at the inns and public-houses on the quays. John Moriarty, of Ballinakilla, County Cork, 45 to 50 years old.

A rural Micawber, dressed in a dilapidated black coat, a pair of green

trousers, completely worn out at the knees, and crushed hat. A Catholic (he says Cathioulic). Squats with wife and children in a single room, almost devoid of furniture. Was to have embarked five days ago for Canada. The Board of Health did not allow it on account of one of the children having got the measles (an illness which assumes in Great Britain a most dangerous and infectious character). Makes no difficulty to tell me his whole history. Had a farm of thirteen acres. Was thriving more or less—rather less than more. But for the last seven years it has been an impossibility for him to make both ends meet.

Strange as it may appear, the man is a Conservative in feeling.

“Nothing to do in the country, with those mob laws and agitation!” says he.

“What mob laws?”

“Well, the trash on fixity of tenure, fair rent and the rest.”

“I thought they were favourable to the tenant.”

“Favourable in one sense, yes, sir,” (with a diplomatic air, as he fastens on me two little chocolate-coloured eyes) “but disastrous in the end, because they allow one to sell his tenant-right at a discount. You believe that it will set you up, and it is the very stone that makes you sink. The banks are our ruin, don’t you see? Once they have taken hold of their man they don’t let him out before they have skinned him” (a silence, then a sigh of mild envy). “It is, indeed, a good trade that of banking!”

He remains dreamy and seems to meditate the scheme of founding a bank in Canada.

Martin Mac Crea, 22 years old, a shepherd of Drumcunning. A Catholic. A tall, pale, thin fellow, decently dressed, with a wide-awake look. Goes to Queensland. Why? “Because there is no opening in Ireland. The most you can do is to earn your bare sustenance.” It appears that in Queensland it is quite a different affair. The profession of shepherd pays there. Let a man bring or save the money necessary to buy half-a-dozen sheep, and let them graze at their will. Seven or eight years later their name is legion, and the man is rich.

“But are you then quite free of ties here? Don’t you leave anybody, any relation, in Ireland?”

“I was obliged to live far from them, and where I go I shall be more able to help them. Besides, the post reaches there.”

“And the young ladies at Drumcunning. Do they allow you to go away without a protest?”

A broad smile lights up Martin Mac Crea’s countenance. A further conversation informs me that his betrothed has gone before him to Brisbane, where she is a servant. He is going to meet her, and they shall settle together in the bush, keeping sheep on their own account.

Let us hope she has waited for him. Queensland is far away!

Pat Coleman, twenty years old. A friend to the former. Son of a small farmer with six children. Nothing to do at home. Prefers going to the Antipodes, to see if there is a way there to avoid dying of starvation, as happened to his grandfather.

Peter Doyle, forty-three years old. A journeyman. A Presbyterian.

Can’t find work at home; therefore emigrates. Was employed on railway construction, county Clare. Has been turned away, the line being completed and open to travellers. Had come to Cork in the hope of getting work, but found only insignificant jobs. Packed to Melbourne.

Dennis O’Rourke, twenty-nine years old; of Enniscorthy, Wexford. An engine-maker; belongs to a class of which I had as yet met no specimen in Ireland, the workman-politician. Has already emigrated to the United States, where he spent three years. Wished to see his country again, and tried to set up a business on a small scale, first in Dublin, then at Cork; but it does not pay. Goes back to New York.

“Do you know why? I am going to tell you. (Fiercely) I am going because this country is rotten to the core! Because it has no spirit left, not even that of rebellion! I am going because I will no longer bear on my back the weight of dukes and peers, of Queen, Prince of Wales, Royal family, and the whole lot of them! I am going where you can work and be free; where a man is worth another when he has got in his pocket two dollars honestly earned. That is where I go, and why I go.”

“In short, you make England responsible for your misfortunes?”

“England be damned!”

It is O’Connell’s word. He was travelling in France, towards St. Omer, and found himself inside the mail-coach with an old officer of the first

Empire who began forthwith to talk against the English. The great Irish agitator kept silent.

“Don’t you hear me?” the other said at last, insolently.

“I beg your pardon, I hear you perfectly well.”

“And you don’t mind my treating your country as I do?”

“England is not my country; I hate it more than you will ever do.”

CHAPTER XII. THE LEAGUE. E

.

The county Clare, and more especially Ennis, its chief town, have played an important part in the contemporary history of Ireland. It was here eight years ago (in 1879) that Mr. Parnell, at a great autumn meeting, gave his famous mot d’ordre on social and political interdict.

“If you refuse to pay unjust rents, if you refuse to take farms from which others have been evicted, the land question must be settled, and settled in a way that will be satisfactory to you. Now, what are you to do to a tenant who bids fora farm from which another has been evicted? You must shun him on the road-side where you meet him,—you must shun him in the shops,—you must shun him in the fair green, and in the market-place, and in the place of worship: by leaving him severely alone, by putting him in a moral Coventry; by isolating him from the rest of his countrymen, as if he were the leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”

Those words contained a whole programme, faithfully carried out since, and which has already borne fruit. They took exceptional force from the fact that Mr. Parnell, at the time he pronounced them, was already the acknowledged leader of Irish opposition. They were in some sort the registration of birth of the League.

The League! Every moment, travelling through this island, one comes in contact with this power, mysterious though positive, anonymous and yet implicitly recognized. The League houses and feeds evicted families; it settles that such a landlord or such a farmer shall be boycotted; it decrees that the rents of such an estate shall be reduced 30 per cent.; that of such another the rents shall be lodged in the League’s own coffers; it patronises candidatures, chooses the place and time of meetings, presides over all the phases of social life. What is that League? is the question one asks.

At first one naturally supposes it to be an electoral association such as exists in every free country. But little by little one perceives that it is a far bigger affair. Electoral associations are not in the habit of inspiring such persistent enthusiasm, of covering during eight long years the extent of a whole country; they do not send roots to the most remote villages, nor do they count among their members three-quarters of the adult population. It is not their custom either to fulminate excommunications, or if they do they have but little appreciable effect on the ordinary tenour of life. One never heard that they disposed of important capital, and one would be less surprised to hear that they had entered into a lawsuit with their printer about an unpaid bill for five or six thousand placards, than one would be to hear that they have several hundred thousand pounds in the bank.

And yet it is precisely of hundred thousand pounds that one constantly hears in connection with the League. Where does it get all that money, in a country worn so threadbare as this? Whence is it that it is so universally respected, so religiously obeyed? All the smiles are for the League, while the functionaries of the Crown pocket only snubbings. All the doors open before the League, while they close and even barricade themselves at the bare mention of the Lord Lieutenant’s name.

One observes these facts; compare and weigh them. Then the conclusion imposes itself quite naturally that the League is the only public power recognised by the bulk of the Irish nation. One already had a suspicion of being a spectator to a revolution, of which the violent deeds, instead of being concentrated over a period of two or three years, as we have seen at home, have spread over half a century. One understands that one has fallen in the midst of a civil war, not in the incipient state, but fully let loose, and that there exists in this island two rival authorities,—that of the Crown with the bayonets on its side; that of the League, possessing all hearts.

Ireland, it is hardly necessary to repeat, has been in a state of rebellion since the beginning of the British Conquest. But it has been in a state of revolution only for a period of about forty years. Insurrection betrayed itself now by individual but constant acts of rebellion, of which one can easily follow the succession through past ages, now by collective risings like those of Thomas Fitzgerald in 1534, of O’Neil in 1563, of Desmond in 1579, of Preston in 1642, of the Whiteboys in 1791, of the Oakboys in 1762, of the Steelboys in 1768, of Wolfe Tone in the course of the French Revolution, of Emmet in 1803, the New Whiteboys in 1807, of John

Mitchell in 1848, of the Fenians in 1865 and 1867. As for the agrarian revolution, born of an economical situation impossible to bear, it follows its course as regularly as a great river, ever getting larger and larger, widening its bed, swelling its volume with all the streams it meets, increasing in power at the same time that its waters get more depth and breadth. Even the soothing mixtures prescribed for it by the Parliamentary doctors have served as its tributaries. Its torrent has at length become irresistible.

To discover its source, we must go back to the famine evictions of 1847. The heart-rending spectacle then presented by Ireland made it natural to look for a palliation to such misery. The malady was studied in all its aspects; much learned discussion took place at the bedside of the agonizing patient. It was the time when Disraeli developed his famous theory of “the three profits.” The land, if one was to believe him, must yield profit to three persons:—the Queen, the landlord, and the tenant. It appears this was arranged from the end of Time by the Great Architect of the Universe. The laws of Kepler are not more absolute. The unlucky thing is that the earth does not always fulfil its obligations, and too often refuses to yield up the three sacramental profits.

Theorists endowed with less boldness thought to find a remedy by giving legal consecration to the tenant’s rights by the system of the three F’s, as it was called, that is to say, Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, and Free Sale. Through endless resistance, after endless debating in the course of twenty parliamentary sessions, a whole remedial legislation came to add its bulk to the already so intricate structure of Anglo-Saxon law.

Now the custom of Ulster was extended to the whole of Ireland, and the right of the farmer over the improvements paid with his money became law (1860); now he was promised an indemnity in case of eviction, and the basis was laid of a system of amortization which must infallibly in the course of time have ended in creating a class of peasant landowners (1870).

Already in the year 1849, the State had interfered between the landlords in difficulties and their tenants, by the creation of a special tribunal for obligatory liquidation,—the Encumbered Estates Court. It finally came to interfere between landlord and tenant by instituting a new court of arbitration, the Land Court, entrusted with the care of fixing the “fair” rent in each case.

That Court was no sooner opened than 75,807 affairs were inscribed upon its roll. It judged in one year 15,676. But there remained still 60,101 to be judged, and already the reductions of 18 to 27 per cent. imposed on the landlords appeared insufficient; already the farmers were loudly clamouring for further reductions.

For in truth such remedies were too anodine for such rooted disease!

But the wedge had nevertheless entered the tree. The State had appeared in the character of umpire between the landlord and the peasant.

Henceforth all was or seemed possible.

The essence of dogmas is to suffer no questioning. One cannot with impunity discuss for twenty years the basis of landed property’s law and the theory of “the three profits” before empty stomachs. As a parallel to these debates, the question of political rights for Ireland rose again, and ended insensibly by the conquest of the electoral franchise, of religious equality, and of national education. The moment arrived when the bulk of the population took an interest only in the truly vital question,—that of the soil. And all of a sudden they understood that there was only one remedy for the ills that weighed so grievously over them: Landlords and tenants cannot continue to live side by side. Either the one or the other must go.

“Let the landlords decamp! They do not belong here,” said the peasants.

“No, by G⸺⸺! The peasants shall go,” answered the landlords; “the way is open....”

It was thus that towards 1876 the Irish movement became agrarian, from being purely national. The League is the organ of that new function.

Its primary idea belongs to two veterans of the Fenian plots, Michael Davitt and John Devoy. But what distinguishes it from those plots, besides a broader basis and larger aims, is that it acts in broad daylight, with face uncovered, appealing to all men of goodwill, using exclusively those constitutional weapons—the right of meeting, the right of association and coalition.

“The Fenians saw only the green flag,” wrote John Devoy. “The men of to-day perceive that under its folds is the Irish land.” Nevertheless, it was to the remains of the Fenian associations that he and Michael Davitt had recourse at first to lay the foundations of the new association. They

went to look for them even to the uttermost end of America, secured the co-operation of some of the most influential members of the Irish emigration, then came back to Europe, and summoned a great preliminary meeting at Irishtown.

As ordinarily enough happens in such cases, their project was at first looked upon coldly by members of Parliament, who thought it impolitic, and violently opposed by the secret societies—Fenians or Ribbonmen— who thought it calculated to cool the Nationalist zeal. But under the too real sufferings produced by two years of famine (1876-1877), the agrarian tempest assumed such formidable proportions, that all resistance had to cease, and the politicians were compelled to lower their flag. For the chiefs of the autonomist party it was a question of no less than keeping or losing their mandate. Either they would adopt the new evangel, or they would be left lying, officers without troops, on the electoral battle-field. Most of them understood this in time.

Mr. Parnell, the most conspicuous of all, had till then limited his part to the demand for a national government for Ireland, and his tactics to parliamentary obstruction. From an economical point of view he still remained, with all his party, on the level of worthy Mr. Butt’s three F’s.

He was one of the first to understand that it was all over with Home Rule, and with his own political fortune, if he hesitated any longer to plunge into deeper waters.

He made his plunge with characteristic resolution. “There is no longer any possibility of conciliation between landlord and tenant,” he said.

“Since the one or the other must go out, it is better that the less numerous class should be the one to do it.” On the 8th of June, 1879, at Westport, he pronounced his famous, “Keep a firm grip on your homesteads!”

From the 21st of October following the agrarian League promulgated circulars, which he signed as president.

The League’s aim and watchword were—The land for the peasant! Its means were the union of all the rural forces, the formation of a resistance fund for evicted farmers, the strike of tenants with a view to compelling the landlords to grant a reduction of rent; and incessant agitation in favour of a law for the liquidation of landed property, which would give the land into the hands of the cultivators by means of partial payments made during a certain number of years.

The success of such a programme, seconded by the political leaders of Ireland, was certain. But its promoters never had dared to hope for a rush

such as was experienced in a few weeks’ time. Adhesions poured in by thousands; all the social classes embraced it. The Catholic clergy themselves, after wavering one moment, found it advisable to follow in the footsteps of the revolutionary party, as the Deputies had done before them. Everywhere local boards were formed which put themselves at the disposal of the central committee. Almost everywhere the Catholic priest, his curates, not unfrequently the Anglican priest himself, were found among the members of the board.

This is enough to show with what alacrity and unanimity the mobilisation of the agrarian army was effected. Far from weakening the Nationalist party, as was feared by its prebendaries, it came out of this tempered afresh, enlarged, associated with the every-day interests, tied indissolubly henceforth, for the majority of an agricultural population, to the most secret if the most ardent wish of their labourers’ heart.

What remained to do was to endow the League with the resources wanted to carry out its programme; but it was not in a country practically ruined, a prey to the tortures of hunger, literally reduced to beggary, that those resources were to be found. Mr. Parnell set out for the land of dollars. He preached the new word there with complete success. Exotic branches of the League were established in the various States of America, in Canada, and Australia; the only thing remaining to do was to organize the in partibus infidelium government that was to take in hand the direction of Ireland.

But a short time since this government sat in a palace of the finest street in Dublin—Sackville Street. There it had its offices, reception rooms, council-room furnished with the orthodox green baize table, its ministerial departments, secretaries and writers, officially headed paper, its stamp, documents, accounts and red tape.

After a recent movement on the offensive on the part of the enemy, the League had to decamp and put all this material in a place of safety. But though it be presently without a known place of abode, the League none the less pursues its work. Do not telegraphic wires keep it in communication with its agents throughout the length and breadth of the territory? Why were Transatlantic cables invented, if not for the purpose of opening permanent communications between the League and its American, Australian, and Asiatic colonies? In all the extent of its jurisdiction, which is that of the globe, the League is obeyed and respected; it possesses the confidence of its innumerable tributaries.

Perhaps that comes from the fact that this committee, though it sometimes accented too much the professional character of its members, has at least the rare merit of faithfully serving its constituents and of being in perfect harmony of conscience with them. Perhaps this is due to the effect of direct subsidies; and we must see there something better than a mere coincidence,—a great lesson for the democracies of the future. One thing is certain: this government, after wielding power for eight years, have their party well in hand. They are able to do without red tape or scribbling. One word is enough to indicate their will, and if they lack secretaries, a hundred newspapers will carry this word to its address.

It would be a matter of some difficulty to appreciate rightly the financial resources of the League Competent judges estimate them at an income of two million francs. It receives on an average, from Englishspeaking countries, a thousand pounds a week. Now and then subscriptions slacken, and the incoming of money is smaller; but the least incident, such as a noisy arrest or a political law-suit, is sufficient to awaken the zeal of the leaguers. That zeal is always proportionate to the energy of resistance opposed by the Cabinet of St. James to the government of Sackville Street. If London so much as raises its head, at once Dublin, and behind Dublin the whole of Ireland, the whole of Irish America, Australia, the Cape, and the extreme depths of India, all are shaken to their very centre,—in other words, they pay.

The chief treasurer of the League, Mr. Egan, giving account of his administration in October, 1882, after a space of three years, stated that during these three years £244,820 had passed through his hands. In this total one-third only came from insular contributors; all the rest came from abroad. £50,000 had been given in relief of distress; over £15,000 had been spent in State trials; nearly £148,000 had been expended through the general Land League and the Ladies’ Land League in support of evicted tenants, providing wooden houses, law costs, sheriffs’ sales, defence against ejectments and various local law proceedings, and upon the general expenses of the organization. A little over £31,900 remained to the account of the association.

There are no reasons for supposing the normal receipts of the League to have diminished much since that period. More recently (in 1886) the